EventVue

Built online communities for conferences

Description

EventVue was as a social private network whose aim was to assist online communities to have a better conference networking experience. This platform helped attendees connect from different parts even before they met at the conference. The platform sought to make social connections easier for people who frequently traveled to attend conferences around the world but end up not knowing or not interacting with their fellow attendees before and after they got to the event. The startup later pivoted to become an event discovery platform.

Stats

Category

Finances

Country

United States

Started

In 2007

Closed

By 2010

Number of Founders

Two

Name of Founders

Josh Fraser, Rob Johnson

Number of Employees

Between 1 And 10

Number of Funding Rounds

2

Total Funding Amount

$455K

Number of Investors

9

Precise Cause of Failure

Bad Market Fit

Business Outcome

Shut Down

Cause of Failure

EventVue shutdown in February 2010, due to the fact that it lacked product-market fit and failed to test early on their assumptions about the usefulness of the product from their target customers view.

EventVue co-founder Josh Fraser wrote in a postmortem that EventVue was a Vitamin instead of a painkiller, the platform was ‘nice to have’ but not necessarily needed by conference organizers. Despite the fact that organizers thought it was a good platform for connectivity and interaction, they weren’t particularly interested in paying for it since it didn’t bring them any additional revenue, cut any of their expenses or make their business any better. Being able to sell more tickets was the primary focus of conference organizers and their product wasn’t addressing that need.

Discovering this, EventVue decided to take a different approach by introducing the EventVue Discover widget which automatically notified people about who else would be attending the conference in hope that this would increase ticket sales for the event. However, this feature backfired at them and sales actually dropped. It seemed that most attendees used the widget to check if friends and acquaintances would attend and when they learned that no one they knew didn’t sign up they refrained from purchasing conference tickets.

A big resource for entrepreneurs and startup owners, in which we have collected and analyzed why +100 big companies have failed. Learn from mistakes, and avoid being part of the 90% of businesses that fail.

EventVue was as a social private network whose aim was to assist online communities to have a better conference networking experience. This platform helped attendees connect from different parts even before they met at the conference. The platform sought to make social connections easier for people who frequently traveled to attend conferences around the world but end up not knowing or not interacting with their fellow attendees before and after they got to the event. The startup later pivoted to become an event discovery platform.

Cause of Failure

EventVue shutdown in February 2010, due to the fact that it lacked product-market fit and failed to test early on their assumptions about the usefulness of the product from their target customers view.

EventVue co-founder Josh Fraser wrote in a postmortem that EventVue was a Vitamin instead of a painkiller, the platform was ‘nice to have’ but not necessarily needed by conference organizers. Despite the fact that organizers thought it was a good platform for connectivity and interaction, they weren’t particularly interested in paying for it since it didn’t bring them any additional revenue, cut any of their expenses or make their business any better. Being able to sell more tickets was the primary focus of conference organizers and their product wasn’t addressing that need.

Discovering this, EventVue decided to take a different approach by introducing the EventVue Discover widget which automatically notified people about who else would be attending the conference in hope that this would increase ticket sales for the event. However, this feature backfired at them and sales actually dropped. It seemed that most attendees used the widget to check if friends and acquaintances would attend and when they learned that no one they knew didn’t sign up they refrained from purchasing conference tickets.